The Idea of God in Early Religions

by F. B. Jevons

It may, perhaps, be asked, why the morality of the community should tend to change, and the myths of the community should not? The reason seems to be that myths are learned by the child in the nursery, and morality is learned by the man in the world. The family is a smaller community than the village community, the city, or the state; and the smaller the community, the more tenacious it is of its customs and traditions. The toys of Athenian children, which have been discovered, are, all, the toys which children continue to use to this day. In the Iliad children built sand-castles on the sea-shore as they do now; and the little child tugged at its mother's dress then as now. Children then as now would insist that the tales told to them should always be told exactly as they were first told. Of the discrepancy between the morality exhibited by the heroes of nursery-tales and that practised by the grown-up world the child has no knowledge, for the sufficient reason that he is not as yet one of the grown-up world. When he enters the grown-up world, he may learn the difference; but he can only enter the grown-up world, if there is one for him to enter; and, in the childhood of man, there is none which he can enter, for the adults themselves, though of larger growth, are children still in mind. Custom and tradition rule the adult community then as absolutely as they rule the child community. In course of time, the adult community may break the bonds of custom and tradition; but the community which consists of children treasures them and hands them on. Within the tribe, thenceforth, there are two communities, that of the adults and that of the children. The one community is as continuous with itself as the other; but the children's community is highly conservative of what it has received and of what it hands on—and that for the simple reason that children will be children still. It is this homogeneity of the children's community which enables it to preserve its customs, traditions and beliefs. And as long as the community of adults is homogeneous, it also departs but little from the customs, traditions and beliefs, which it has inherited from the same source as the children's community has inherited them. The two communities, the children's and the adults', originate and develop within the larger community of the tribe. They differentiate, at first, with exceeding slowness; the children's community changes more slowly even than the adults'—its weapons continue to be the bow and arrow, long after adults have discarded them; and the bull-roarer continues sacred in its eyes to a period when the adult community has not only discarded its use but forgotten its meaning. In its tales and myths it may preserve the memory of a stage of morality which the adult community has outgrown, and has left behind as far it has left behind the bull-roarer or the bow and arrow. And the stage of morality, of which it preserves the memory, is one from which the adult community in past time emerged. Having emerged, indeed, it found itself, eventually, when made to look back, compelled to condemn that which it looked back upon.

What, then, were these myths, with which the moralised community might find itself confronted? They were tales which originated in the mind of the community when it was yet immature. They preserve to us the reflections of the immature mind about the gods and what they did. And it is because the minds, which made these reflections, were immature, that the myths which embodied or expressed these reflections, were such as might be accepted by immature minds, but were eventually found intolerable by more mature minds. It may, perhaps, be said—and it may be said with justice—that the reflections even of the immature mind are not all, of necessity, erroneous, for it is from them that the whole of modern knowledge has been evolved or developed, just as the steam-plough may be traced back to the primitive digging-stick: reflection upon anything may lead to better knowledge of the thing, as well as to false notions about it. But the nations, which have outgrown mythology, have cast it aside because in the long run they became convinced that the notions it embodied were false notions. And they reached that conclusion on this point in the same way and for the same reason as they reached the same conclusion in other matters; for there is only one way. There is only one way and one test by which it is possible to determine whether the inferences we have drawn about a thing are true or false, and that is the test of experience. That alone can settle the question whether the thing actually does or does not act in the way, or display the qualities alleged. If it proves in our experience to act in the way, or to display the qualities, which our reflection led us to surmise, then our conception of the thing is both corrected and enlarged, that is to say, the thing proves to be both more and other than it was at first supposed to be. If experience shows that it is not what we surmised, does not act in the way or display the qualities our reflection led us to expect, then, as the conclusions we reached are wrong, our reflections were on a wrong line, and must have started from a false conception or an imperfect idea of the thing.

It is collision of this kind between the conclusions of mythology and the idea of the gods, as the guardians of morality, that rouses suspicion in a community, still polytheistic, first that the conclusions embodied in mythology are on a wrong line, and next that they must have started from a false conception or imperfect idea of the Godhead. By its fruits is the error found to be error—by the immorality which it ascribes to the very gods whose function it is to guard morality. Mythology is the process of reflection which leads to conclusions eventually discarded as false, demonstrably false to anyone who compared them with the idea of the Godhead which he had in his own soul. Mythology worked out the consequences of the assumption that it is to the external world we must look for the divine personality of whose presence in the common consciousness, the community has at all times, been, even though dimly, aware. Doubts as to the truth of myths were first aroused by the inconsistency between the myths told and the justice and morality which had been from the beginning the very essence of divine personality. The doubts arose in the minds and hearts of individual thinkers; and, if those individuals had been the only members of the community who conceived justice and morality to be essential qualities of the divine personality, then it would have been necessary for such thinkers first to convert the community to that view. Now, one of the consequences of the prevalence of mythology is that the community, amongst whom it flourishes, comes to be, if not doubtful, then at times forgetful, of the fact that the gods of the community are moral beings and the guardians of morality. That fact had to be dismissed from attention, for the time being, whenever certain myths were related. And, the more frequently a fact is dismissed from attention, the less likely it is to reappear on the surface of consciousness. Thus, the larger the part played by mythology in the field of the common consciousness, the greater its tendency to drive out from attention those moral qualities which were of the essence of divine personality. But, however large the part played by mythology, and however great its tendency to obliterate the moral qualities of the gods, it rarely, if indeed ever, entirely obliterates them from the field of the common consciousness. Consequently, the individual thinkers, who become painfully aware of the contrast and opposition between the morality, which is essential to a divine personality, and the immorality ascribed to the gods in some myths, have not to deal with a community which denies that the gods have any morality whatever, but with a community which is ready to admit the morality of the gods, whenever its attention is called thereto. Thus, though it may be that it is in this or that individual that the inconsistency between the moral qualities, which belong to the gods, and the immoral actions which mythology ascribes to the gods, first manifests itself, to his distress and disturbance, still what has happened in his case happens in the case of some, and may happen in the case of all, other members of the community. The inconsistency then comes to exist not merely for the individual but for the common consciousness.

It was the immorality of mythology which first drew the attention of believers in polytheism to the inconsistency between the goodness, which was felt to be of the essence of the divine nature, and the vileness, which was imputed to them in some myths; but it is the irrationality and absurdity of mythology that seems, to the modern mind, to be its most uniform characteristic. So long as the only mythology that was studied was the mythology of Indo-European peoples, it was assumed, without question, that the myths could not really be, or originally have been, irrational and absurd: they must conceal, under their seeming absurdity and outwardly irrational appearance, some truth. They must have had, originally, some esoteric meaning. They must have conveyed—allegorically, indeed—some profound truths, known or revealed to sages of old, which it was the business of modern students to re-discover in mythology. And accordingly profound truths—scientific, cosmographic, astronomical, geographical, philosophic or religious—were discovered. There was no knowledge which the early ancestors of the human race were not supposed to have possessed, and their descendants to have forgotten.

But, when it came to be discovered, and accepted, that the ancestors of the Indo-European peoples had once been savages, and that savages, all the world over, possessed myths, it became impossible to maintain that such savages possessed in their mythologies treasures of truth either scientific or religious. Myths have no esoteric meaning. Obviously we must take them to be what we find them to be amongst present-day savages, that is, absurd and irrational stories, with no secret meaning behind them. Yet it is difficult, indeed impossible, to accept this as the last word on the subject. The stories are rejected by us, because they are patently absurd and irrational. But the savage does not reject them: he accepts them. And he could not accept and believe them, if he, as well as we, found them irrational and absurd. In a word, it is the same with the irrationality as it is with the immorality of mythology: myths are the work and the product of the common consciousness. As such, myths cannot be viewed as irrational by the common consciousness in which they originated, and by which they were accepted and transmitted, any more than they were regarded as immoral.

Obviously, the common consciousness which produces mythology cannot pronounce the myths, when it produces them, and accepts them, absurd. On the contrary, they are rational, in its eyes, and according to its level of understanding, however absurd the growth of knowledge may eventually show them to be. Myths, then, in their origin, are told and heard, narrated and accepted, as rational and intelligible. As narrated, they are narratives: can we say that they are anything more? or are they tales told simply for the pleasure of telling? Tales of this latter kind, pure fiction, are to be found wherever man is. But, we have already seen some points in which myths differ from tales of this kind: in fiction the artist creates his hero, but in myths the being superior to man, of whom the story is told is not the creation of the teller of the tale; he is a being known to the community to exist. Another point of difference is that a myth belongs to the god of whom it is told and cannot properly be told of any other god. These are two respects in which the imagination is limited, two points on which, in the case of myths, the creative imagination is, so to speak, nailed down. Is it subject to any further restriction in the case of myths? Granted that an adventure, when once it has been set down to one god, may not be set down to another, is the creative imagination free, in the case of mythology, as it is in the case of pure fiction, to invent the incidents and adventures, which eventually—in a lexicon of mythology—go to make up the biography of the god? The freedom, it appears, is of a strictly limited character.

It is an induction, as wide as the world—being based on mythologies from all parts of the world—that myths are aetiological, that their purpose is to give the reason of things, to explain the origin of fire, agriculture, civilisation, the world—of anything, in fact, that to the savage seems to require explanation. In the animistic period, man found gods everywhere because everywhere he was looking for gods. To every object that arrested his attention, in the external world, he put, or might put, the question, 'Art thou there?' Every happening that arrested the attention of a whole community, and provoked from the common consciousness the affirmation, 'Thou art there,' was, by that affirmation, accepted as the doing of a god. But neither at this stage, nor for long after, is there any myth. The being, whose presence is thus affirmed, has at first no name: his personality is of the faintest, his individuality, the vaguest. Mythology does not begin until the question is put, 'Why has the god done this thing?' A myth consists, or originally consisted, of the reason which was found and adopted by the common consciousness as the reason why the god did what he did do. It is in this sense that myths are aetiological. The imagination which produces them is, in a sense, a 'scientific imagination.' It works within limits. The data on which it works are that this thing was done, or is done, by this god; and the problem set to the mythological imagination is, 'Why did he, or does he, do it?' The stories which were invented to answer this question constituted mythology; and the fact that myths were invented for the purpose of answering this question distinguishes them from stories in the invention of which the imagination was not subject to restriction, was not tied down to this god and to this action of his, and was not limited to the sole task of imagining an answer to the question, 'Why did he do it?' All myths are narratives, but not all narratives are myths. Some narratives have men alone for their heroes. They are imaginative but not mythological. Some narratives are about gods and what they did. Their purpose is to explain why the gods did what they did do, and those narratives are mythological.

It may, perhaps, seem that the imagination of early man would from the first be set to work to invent myths in answer to the question, 'Why did the god do this thing?' But, as a matter of fact, man can get on for a long time without mythology. A striking instance of this is afforded by the di indigites of Italy. Over everything man did, or suffered, from his birth to his death, one of these gods or goddesses presided. The Deus Vagitanus opened the lips of the new-born infant when it uttered its first cry; the Dea Ossipago made the growing child's bones stout and strong; the Deus Locutius made it speak clearly; the goddess Viriplaca restored harmony between husband and wife who had quarrelled; the Dea Orbona closed a man's eyes at death. These di indigites had shrines and received sacrifices. They were distinguished into gods and goddesses. Their names were proper names, though they are but words descriptive of the function which the deity performed or presided over. Yet though these di indigites are gods, personal gods, to whom prayer and sacrifice are offered, they have no mythology attached to them; no myths are told about them.

The fact thus forced on our notice by the di indigites of Rome should be enough to warn us that mythology does not of necessity spring up, as an immediate consequence of the worship of the gods. It may even suggest a reason why mythology must be a secondary, rather than a primary consequence of worship. The Romans were practical, and so are savages: if they asked the question, 'Why did this god do this thing?' they asked it in no spirit of speculation but for a practical, common-sense reason: because they did not want this thing done again. And they offered sacrifices to the god or goddess, with that end in view. The things with regard to which the savage community first asks the question, 'Why did the god do it?' are things disastrous to the community—plague or famine. The answer to the question is really implied by the terms in which the question is stated: the community, or some member of the community has transgressed; he must be discovered and punished. So long and so far as the question is thus put and thus answered, there is little room for mythology to grow in. And it did not grow round the di indigites in Italy, or round corresponding deities in other countries.

But the question, 'Why did the god do it?' is susceptible, on reflection, of another kind of answer. And from minds of a more reflective cast than the Roman, it received answer in the form of mythology, of aetiological myths. Mythology is the work of reflection: it is when the community has time and inclination to reflect upon its gods and their doings that mythology arises in the common consciousness. For everything which happens to him, early man has one explanation, if the thing is such as seems to him to require explanation, and the explanation is that this thing is the doing of some god. If the thing that arrests attention is some disaster, which calls for remedy, the community approaches the god with prayer and sacrifice; its object is practical, not speculative; and no myth arises. But if the thing that arrests attention is not one which calls for action, on the part of the community, but one which stimulates curiosity and provokes reflection, then the reflective answer to the question, why has this thing been done by whatever god that did it, is a myth.